CogNarr Ecosystem: Preliminary Thoughts on a Story Graph Meaning Representation

All right, hello and welcome. This is Active Inference Guest Stream 87.1 on September 5th, 2024. We're here with John Boyk and Lee Ayer. So Lee, how about please say hello and give some contextualizing thoughts. Introduce John however you like and then we'll have presentation discussion with John. So go for it Lee, thank you. Sure, thanks Daniel. So I came across John through the Active Inference Institute because he was the only other person sitting on the strange intersection that I'm sitting on in this space between looking at societal transformation and active inference as well. So I was very excited and I joined the first live stream that he did on his science-driven transformation papers and subsequently I contacted him and we both explored a kind of a shared interest I guess in functional forms of cognition at scale and how those can be facilitated and John was talking about the potential of some kind of software solution to facilitate that and the kind of the discussion that ensued over the following months has led to John creating this paper. So I've kind of been in discussion with him sort of over the months and I'm really really interested to get more into this presentation. Okay thank you go for it John. Thanks Lee, appreciate that but I think it was more like many months of discussions that we were engaged in but led up to this paper. So thanks for all your input during that time. So my name is John Boyk. I'm a research fellow at the Active Inference Institute. I'm very pleased to be appointed to that position. I have two new preprints available to the public, two papers that we'll be discussing today both on the topic of group cognition at scale as Lee mentioned uh I'm I'm proposing a a essentially software ecosystem online ecosystem for group cognition at scale and uh and we'll today we'll talk about uh kind of the some of the general ideas there the overview of that project and then uh on the second guest stream but maybe is this slides view can everyone see the slides right now and can you go to the next slide then please um so there's two two papers have two guest streams that we're doing uh today and then the next one is on September 10th uh and on the second one today we'll cover some general life general concepts and on the second one we'll get a little bit more into some technical details about the underlying meaning representation uh of when we'll discuss in a moment what that term meaning representation means is but this first paper is available on archive you can download the paper from there and um and let's get started next slide please so i'm proposing something called the cognar ecosystem and cognar stands for cognitive narrative and in concept and i and i should say this is just a concept this is uh this project is still in its incubation phase uh um uh the the two papers are the substance of what has been done so far on this project and i'm hoping that i can interest others in the research community and in other communities civic civil society communities and other communities to get engaged with this project and help it to move forward so in concept this is an open source uh online extensible ecosystem of basically software but resources tools applications library services that facilitates group cognition and especially for large groups um and and especially with regard to deliver deliberation strategizing problem solving uh decision making and that kind of things but you'll see that as we go through these slides you'll see that there's really a variety of use cases for this but these are the use cases that i really had in mind as i was um developing the concept for the for the project so essentially cognar helps users to what i what the way i phrase it is tell their story and by that i mean to convey their beliefs to the to what to their group about how the world works relative to some situation so um a group can be anything uh could be a you know could be a uh uh could be a a city could be a…